Let's Get Real

It's Gonna Be a Tough Election

Okay. Kamala Harris is off to a better start than any of us could have anticipated. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have helped by playing the creepy misogynist card. It is remarkable how profoundly they’ve screwed things up. You may not have noticed but, there was no Trump convention bounce, not even after a failed assassination attempt which could have set the stage a massive outpouring of public sympathy. And Kamala’s momentum is likely to continue for the next weeks, despite the prediction today on multiple media sites that the initial Harris “sugar rush” is coming to an end. She will have at least two opportunities in the coming weeks to trump Trump: her selection of a vice president and the Democratic National Convention (provided that the left sillies don’t put on too destructive and foolish a show there).

So, cause for optimism? Certainly. There were three overriding issues running against the Democrats in this election—and one massive iceberg, mostly submerged, which I’ll get to in a minute. The biggest issue, by far, was Joe Biden’s age and his inability to inspire; that’s gone…and may be replaced by Donald Trump’s age and incoherence. Inflation is still with us and will remain so; it is a problem Dems will have to acknowledge rather than deny. Immigration is sort of like inflation on one level: it’s not as bad as it once was. Biden finally acted to close the border. But immigration’s evil twin, nativism, still festers. And that is the part of this election’s iceberg, the complex of issues that gave rise to Donald Trump in the first place: The Great Transformation. The end of white Christian heterosexual hegemony. The Revenge of the Gringos, as I started calling it 30 years ago.

That problem remains. And it may be reified on a subconscious level: The Democrats have traded a geezer for the black-Asian-woman-liberal personification of all that the Trumpers have been quietly freaked about. If you don’t believe Kamala Harris is in for a truly painful campaign, watch this ad:

https://x.com/DaveMcCormickPA/status/1815894904650047929

It’s the culture, stupid. And Democrats, led by their arrogant, elitist academic wing, have pursued a disastrous course for decades, emphasizing identity over unity, equity over equality of opportunity, and playing annoying, euphemistic, dilettante word games, using terms like socialism, gender-affirmation, white privilege, people of color, unhoused, intersectionality (whatever that is), Latinx and pronoun-imprecision—all guaranteed, indeed intended, to kick sand in the face of the bourgeoisie. This is the heart of the election of 2024, just as it was in 2016 and 2020: deplorables reacting against deplorables. Here’s Barton Swaim of the Wall Street Journal, reporting on a Trump rally:

This leads me back to a basic and, I’m sure, not entirely original observation. Mr. Trump’s popularity among lower- and middle-income Americans is largely the product of progressive insanity…Only in 2016, when modern liberalism had blossomed into a coterie of what we now call “woke” ideologies—the obsession with racial and sexual identity, the hatred of America and the West, the loathing of law enforcement—did Mr. Trump’s candidacy electrify the country’s wage earners and shopkeepers.

Mr. Trump’s fandom is a measure of middle- and working-class exasperation with the delusions and perversities of an illiberal progressive elite. That is why his poll numbers go up, as he loves to remind audiences, every time prosecutors indict him. For his fans, and for many right-leaning people who wish he’d be “nicer” and who regret the stridency of politics in the 21st century, the indictments validate Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

If his popularity is, as I think, a product of the Democrats’ leftward lurch, Republicans can take solace in Ms. Harris’s likely ascension.

Even the ultimate Trump insanity, the notion that the 2020 election was stolen, is a function of this phenomenon. In White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman cite a brilliant analysis by the sociologist Theda Skocpol:

“I don’t think Stop the Steal is about ballots at all. I don’t believe a lot of people really think that the votes weren’t counted correctly in 2020…They believe that urban people, metropolitan people—disproportionately young and minorities to be sure, but frankly liberal whites—are an illegitimate brew that’s changing America in unrecognizable ways and taking it away from them. Stop the Steal is a way of saying that. Stop the Steal is a metaphor.”

What’s a black-Asian-woman-liberal to do? Embrace it. Embrace the suck. At least, most of it. If a rapist-fraudster-felon-traitor-sociopath can be elected President, surely a black-Asian-woman-liberal who is married to, of all things, a Jew, has a shot. In fact, Kamala Harris’s ethnic heritages and her marriage are a lodestar for people like me. It previews a new ethnicity, which I call, simply: American. Certainly, that’s the way my grandchildren are best identified: they’re so damn heterodox, and wonderfully so, they can only be Americans. This sort of diversity—natural, not imposed by bureaucrats—is the fount of our national creativity and entrepreneurialism. It is the completion of our wildass, informal, frontier-seeking spirit. We are a nation of mongrels, and mongrels are tough—and quite often, beautiful. That is the heart of American exceptionalism. That is what real patriots believe.

But Harris has to do at least one more thing. The negative ad above is brutal, but inescapable. Harris ran a profoundly foolish campaign in 2020, tacking toward a non-existent left. One would hope that she’s learned a lot in the past four years, but the stain will remain for a great many voters—though perhaps not the independents and suburban Republican women who will decide this election. She can plead maturity, she can say she’s learned from her mistakes, but she can’t run away from all of it; she may not want to run from aspects of it—like assault rifle buybacks. Or votes for felons. She can say: I don’t think we can deny my opponent the right to vote.

And then she can emphasize the most undervalued word in American politics: responsibility. My favorite political slogan in recent history was Bill Clinton’s: Opportunity, Community, Responsibility. Responsibility is ecumenical. It can be applied equally to billionaires who don’t pay their fair share of taxes and deadbeat dads. It certainly can be applied to those who get something for nothing from the government—like Biden’s ill-advised student loan forgiveness program. She can say: In my administration, you won’t get something for nothing. Freedom has a price. You gotta kick in. You gotta serve and sacrifice, especially if we spend taxpayer dollars on enhancing your opportunities in life. If you commit a violent crime, you go to jail. If you commit a non-violent crime, you do community service.

There is no need to get into the details of a responsibility program in this campaign. The basic concept will do. It undercuts an essential component of the Trump message: that there are unAmerican people who are gaming the system. Reciprocal responsibility should be at the core of a new American optimism. It is an American tradition that Harris should represent.